Of the 5 Argento gialli I've seen, this is by far the sparest and the brightest with the least complicated plot (I figured the Phantom of this opera pretty fast), an absence of dark, foreboding supernatural forces, and paucity of goopy baroque set detailing, I'm pretty sure he was trying to avoid too literal a comparison to that previous notorious phantom legend, but obviously backstage, among the coulisses has a lot more camera possibilities than the Diva's (
Cristina Marsillach) standard dressing room and mundane apartment. It seems the writer/director had long harbored a desire to torture certain scaredy cats in his audience by the means discussed in the trivia section here and he finally satisfied his yen vicariously with this film. As such, the simplistic plot, apart from s satisfyingly weird ending, is merely an uncluttered structure to hang his signature bizarre gory death scenes on, and they do seem to be particularly all of a piece, clean cinematic moments of elegance and grace.
